


Indigo and Honey, Cassia and Cream

by Transposable_Element



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Archenland, Calormen, Gen, Race, standards of beauty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-09-25
Packaged: 2018-02-18 18:56:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2358707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transposable_Element/pseuds/Transposable_Element
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aravis fails to meet two completely different standards of beauty. She tells herself it doesn't matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indigo and Honey, Cassia and Cream

In Calormen there were many terms describing black hair: jet (if shiny), coal (if soft), smoky (if brownish). Black with red highlights was called crimson. Black with blue highlights was called indigo, and greatly admired. As a little girl Aravis wished for indigo hair and cassia skin, like the goddesses and princesses in the tales her mother told her. But Aravis’s hair was not black at all. It was brown, the color politely called earthy (or, less politely, muddy). Her skin was called umber, which was all right, but nothing special. As she grew older people complimented her intellect or her horsemanship, never her looks. Her nose was high-bridged (good), but large (bad), and her eyebrows were thick (very bad, for a girl); everybody said she looked like her father, and even though he was considered a handsome man, this was clearly not meant as a compliment. Her stepmother, who was beautiful, with coal black hair and golden skin, and who hated her, told her flat-out that she was ugly—and Aravis knew that her stepmother was not the only person who thought so, merely the only person who said so. Aravis decided it was better to be strong, smart, and capable than pretty. She studied diligently, and she swam and rode and practiced archery. She hounded her older brother until he agreed to teach her hand-to-hand fighting and the scimitar. She didn’t need to be beautiful. She told herself that it didn’t matter.

When she came to the North she encountered a whole new standard of beauty that she also failed to meet: here they prized creamy skin, rosy cheeks, blue or green eyes, curly fair hair. There were as many words for different shades of yellow hair as there were for black hair in Calormen. Blond hair could be golden, pinky, butter, honey, sweet (which meant very pale), wheat (which meant darker). Aravis never did figure out what all of them meant. Given that curly blond hair was so admired here, it was ironic that Queen Susan, who was considered the great beauty of the North, had straight black hair. From the back, she almost looked like a Calormene. But her hair was a striking contrast to her fair skin and blue eyes (large and widely-spaced, with long black lashes). Queen Susan’s features were elegant and perfectly proportioned and she was poised and graceful; so she was called beautiful. She had been beautiful even in Calormen, where white skin and blue eyes were strange and unsettling, some said demonic. Aravis’s coloring wasn’t striking. Here, where nobody made the same fine distinctions as at home, she was brown all over: hair, skin, eyes. Her narrow face, her high-bridged nose, her long eyes, her thick eyebrows, her thin lips, her firm chin, and, of course, her coloring—none of them conformed to Northern ideas of beauty. And Northerners seemed to like women voluptuous and large-breasted—unlike in Calormen, where a slender, willowy physique was admired in both women and men, and where Aravis’s figure had been the one thing about her that was as it should be. She was even plainer here than she had been at home. People searching for a compliment said she had excellent teeth. At best, she was “exotic,” which just meant she looked different from everybody else. She told herself that it didn’t matter. 

Cor thought she was beautiful, but he didn’t say so until after he’d already said he loved her, so she told him he was biased.

“As the poets have written, _love clouds the clearest eye_ ,” she said.

“I didn’t like you at all when we first met, but I thought you were pretty even then,” he objected.

“That’s just because I was the first girl you’d ever met who didn’t smell like fish and dress in rags.”

He said there had been some very pretty girls in the fishing village who had _not_ smelled like fish (or at least no more than he had), so it wasn’t just that she'd been clean and well-dressed, but Aravis refused to believe him. 

Cor thought Aravis’s hair was splendid: a rich dark brown, thick and soft and wavy. After they were married he liked to help her braid it, and not just so he could kiss the back of her neck and suggest ways they might go about messing up those braids later on. He thought her face was splendid, too: not sweetly pretty, but regal and commanding, intense, passionate, serious. Besides, Archenlandish and Narnian faces never looked quite right to him, even after years in the North. Some women here were very lovely, but they were too pale and soft. Not that he would ever be so rude or so cruel as to say it, but he couldn’t help thinking it.

Their eldest child, Soon, looked very much like his father, though with somewhat darker hair and eyes. This was all to the good as far as Aravis was concerned, because (she said) Cor was a handsome man by any standard. Also, although their subjects had more or less accepted the idea of a Calormene queen consort, they wanted a king who looked like an Archenlander. Vel (ironically named after Aravis’s mother, Veledis), looked even more like Cor. She was golden-haired, blue-eyed, and rosy-cheeked, and everybody said she was destined to be a beauty. But Ram looked like Aravis, and like his grandfather Kidrash, only with greenish eyes, which everyone declared were fine and striking. It was all right for him to look so much like a Calormene, since he wasn’t the heir. The twins, Kerr and Kerra, and the baby, Lune, all ended up looking neither Archenlandish nor Calormene, but were something new and different. They were "exotic." Aravis thought all of her children were very beautiful, and for once it really and truly didn’t matter to her what anybody else thought.

**Author's Note:**

> I agree with Cor: Aravis is very beautiful. But what do I know?
> 
> As for Cor and Aravis's children, genetic determination of hair, skin, and eye color is a lot more complicated than many of us were taught in school. For example, blue eye color is not a simple recessive trait.


End file.
